Build a safety-first robotics culture.
Safety is the foundation of every successful FRC team: a value woven through build season, travel, and competition that keeps students, mentors, volunteers, and spectators injury-free. This branch covers the official FIRST Robotics Competition & FIRST Tech Challenge Safety Manual requirements — PPE, shop and tool safety, machine guarding, sealed-lead-acid and lithium-ion battery handling, pneumatics and electrical safety — plus the enforced event and pit rules from the Game Manual, and the people and programs that drive a safety culture: the Student Safety Captain, the Safety All Star, the UL Solutions Safety Managers, and the Safety Animation Award. You will learn not just the rules, but how to lead a team that genuinely lives them.
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The learning path
Safety in FIRST is a value, not a checklist. This module explains the culture of safety every team must embrace, who is responsible for it, and the official roles and recognition programs — the Student Safety Captain, UL Solutions Safety Managers, the Safety All Star, and the Safety Animation Award.
Module overview: Foundations: A Culture of Safety and the People Who Lead ItThe day-to-day fundamentals: the personal protective equipment FIRST requires, how to use hand tools and shop machines safely, machine guarding, and controlling the stored energy that makes a robot dangerous to service.
Module overview: PPE and Shop SafetyThe three energy systems that make an FRC robot powerful — and dangerous if mishandled. Learn to handle, charge, and dispose of batteries; operate a pneumatic system safely; and respect the robot's electrical system.
Module overview: Battery, Pneumatics, and Electrical SafetyBring it all to competition: the enforced pit and event safety rules, safe robot lifting and transport, and how to build and run a real team safety program with the FIRST Safety Checklist and Corrective Action Plan.
Module overview: Events, Robot Handling, and Your Team Safety ProgramA hands-on, buildable module where your safety program stops being a binder and becomes a set of repeatable procedures, tools, and code. You will build a real battery-management workflow with the Battery Beak and a logging spreadsheet, wire and document a Lockout/Tagout (LOTO) procedure for the robot, write motor-controller current-limit code that prevents brownouts, assemble a competition-grade pit safety kit with exact part numbers, and run a 30-minute mock pit safety inspection. Every example is concrete, uses real FRC parts and real APIs, and produces an artifact you can show a UL Safety Advisor. Note: since the 2022 season FIRST no longer judges a standalone Industrial Safety Award; instead, safe practices are a requirement for eligibility for ALL judged awards, and UL Safety Advisors still walk the pits to observe, assess, and coach teams. Building these artifacts is how you satisfy that requirement.
Module overview: Safety Worked Examples & Mini-ProjectsReal pitfalls, the symptoms that reveal them, and the debugging workflow to fix them - at the bench, in the pit, and in code. This module catalogs the mistakes that actually injure FRC teams and tank inspections: brownouts from undersized wiring and missing current limits, battery handling errors, electrical-isolation failures inspectors fail you for, stored-energy surprises during pit work, and the pit-conduct findings (daisy-chained strips, missing glasses) a UL Safety Advisor flags. Each lesson pairs the mistake with a concrete diagnostic procedure and a verified fix using real part numbers and real rule numbers.
Module overview: Common Safety Mistakes & TroubleshootingA deep-dive into the systems thinking that separates a checklist from a real safety program. You will apply the OSHA/NIOSH Hierarchy of Controls to design out FRC hazards, run a Job Safety Analysis (JSA) on shop machines, build a design FMEA with Risk Priority Numbers to prioritize the riskiest mechanisms, run rigorous incident investigations with 5 Whys, and study worked case studies - a brownout-caused match loss, a battery fire avoided, and a pneumatic injury near-miss - to see these tools in action. This is how teams build safety on substance, not posters - which matters now that safe practices are a requirement for eligibility for every judged award.
Module overview: Advanced Safety Engineering & Case Studies7 modules, 28 lessons, all free — grounded in the real Game Manual and WPILib docs. Read now, track your mastery when you sign up.